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Dedicated Private Cloud

A dedicated private cloud is your cloud, but it is operated and maintained by an off-site third-party provider. The provider supplies all of the compute resources, carved out from their data centers so those resources are dedicated exclusively for your use but segmented from multi-tenant portions of their environment.

Ideal WorkloadsAlmost anything that will work in a self-run or co-lo private cloud is a candidate for a dedicated private cloud:

• Customized line-of-business applications
• Data and applications with high security and compliance requirements
• Cloud initiatives where you have recently made large on-premise investments
• Workloads that require a high degree of control
• Mission-critical workloads

Cost DriverWith a dedicated private cloud, the provider owns the infrastructure, and you are paying to consume that infrastructure as a service. Capital expenditures on hardware are largely replaced by operational expenditures on that service, creating potential economic advantage. There still may be software-related capital expense that you’ll have to layer onto the infrastructure environment, depending on your application stack.

Less Challenging

Security: Because the infrastructure is dedicated to your deployment, you are able to establish your own security and compliance standards, as well as enforce and measure them.

Resilience: Dedicated cloud providers specialize supporting stringent uptime standards. Resilience is one of the main reasons why organizations consider an off-premise solution like a dedicated private cloud versus maintaining their own datacenter.

Somewhat Challenging

Control: You are yielding some elements of control to the provider—generally you don’t get to decide what brand, make and model of compute resources you are provided, or how the environment is run. Instead, you agree to a set of SLAs around uptime, availability, recovery, etc. You still have control over provisioning and managing your resources; you give the orders, and the provider carries them out.

Flexibility: In a dedicated private cloud, the hardware and gear is not your own, but the environment is partitioned for your exclusive use. There are potential limitations because your target architecture has to work in the provider’s environment.

Elasticity: If you need to rapidly expand your capacity beyond current levels, it will require provisioning the additional resources required from the provider. In addition, you will be committing to your maximum required capacity. However, most providers are adept at rapidly increasing capacity, and can do so quickly. Time-to-production is reduced in a dedicated environment versus self-run or co-lo environments.

Management: Your IT resources still operate the environment, but they are no longer responsible for the maintaining it—that is now the responsibility of the provider, freeing up time for your IT resources.

Mobility: The technological capabilities are available to provide highly scalable and available mobile access to organizations, but it depends on how the provider leverages their architecture to provide the required mobile access.